The Art of Legal Reasoning

Douglas Lind

The Art of Legal Reasoning is carefully designed to help you get the most out of your cases and your practice. Legal reasoning is applied logic. While your logical intuitions may well be strong enough to generally permit smooth navigation through webs of complex legal arguments without error, unfamiliarity with logic and argument limits your analytical oversight, making you vulnerable to committing or overlooking mistakes of reasoning that can affect the outcome of cases.

Douglas Lind recognizes that you have precious little time to study logic as an independent subject. This course provides short and concise descriptions of argument forms and logical fallacies (errors of reasoning) most relevant to legal practice. The principles of inductive and deductive reasoning Lind teaches apply equally to

trial work

contract drafting

adjudicative practice

any area of practice that calls itself “law.”

There are appeals to sentiment, provisions of self-interest, and “value-judgments” to be sure, but, as one appellate court stated:

“Every legal analysis should begin at the point of reason, continue along a path of logic and arrive at a fundamentally fair result.”

That is what Lind teaches in a fast-paced and information-packed day that his audiences love.